Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Mircea Eliade is best known in English as a historian of religion, but he was also a prolific author of fiction and fantasy. He regarded the long novel published in English as The Forbidden Forest as his chef d'oeuvre, but mny readers will find its loops and repetitions wearisome. However, his shorter fiction can be captivating while evoking some of Eliade's favorite philosophic themes: how the sacred is "camouflaged" in the profane, how at any turning we may encounter a moment of theophany, when the divine irrupts into everyday life and we are released from limits of time and space. I have been rereading the stories published in translation as Two Strange Tales. In "Nights in Serampore" Perhaps we should call stories like this nonfiction fantasy rather than fiction. Eliade makes himself a lead character. He assigns roles to actual people under their real names, in this case well-known people he encountered in India: the Russian (Eastern Orthodox) scholar of Islam Bogdanov,
the Dutch Secretary of the Asia Society, van Manen, and Swami Sivananda
(“Shivananda” in this version). The two Westerners, with the narrator (Eliade
himself) are in the habit of driving to a rich man’s house in the woods near
Serampore, sixteen miles from Calcutta, for long nights of talking, smoking and
drinking in a lovely setting, in the perfumed air.
A mystery develops. A Hindu professor
reputed to be a master of tantra and yogic siddhis is seen on the road in his
dhoti with the saffron stripes on his forehead. Questioned later, he denies having been there. He
is spotted again, after Eliade has been discoursing on “awful” methods used to
acquire occult powers in Hindu tradition, like meditating all night while
seated on a corpse. That evening, as the threesome leave the rich man’s house,
something strange happens during the car ride. It is taking far longer than it
should to get to the highway, the trees are getting bigger and bigger. Eliade
closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them the jungle is wild and
unfamiliar.
They hear a woman’s screams. They
get out of the car and follow a flickering light through the jungle. It brings
them to charcoal burners, and old, rather grand house. The owner receives them,
but moves and speaks very slowly, using only an archaic form of Bengali.
The visitors are confused. They forget the screams that brought them here. Then they remember something, and start to ask questions. The owner of the house informed them that they heard the screams of his wife as she was stabbed to death. Look, here is her body, being carried in on a bier.
Eliade and his friends leave in discomfort and confusion. They can hardly stay when the lady of the house has just been murdered. Weary and drained, they pause under a tree where Eliade takes a nap. Eventually they find their way back to the car. The driver acts as though they never left. Confounded, Eliade and his companions retrace their steps. They return to the tree where Eliade took a nap. They see their footprints on the
ground and follow them. They come to a clearing where the signs of their passage end. There is no grand house, no charcoal burners, no murdered woman being prepared for cremation. They learn that there was a great house at this place, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago, before it was burned to the ground. The case of the murdered woman, whose name was Lila, was notorious. She died resisting men who were trying to abduct her. It seems
that Eliade and his friends were transported across time. Their adventure was not only a metaphysical, since it produced
physical effects – their torn and dirtied clothes, their footprints on the ground. When they seek to make sense of this, their suspicions fall on Suren
Bose, the yogi magician. Could he have worked an enchantment, to distract them
from spying on whatever he was doing in the forest? How could this be?
Eliade’s question remains unanswered
until he goes to a monastery in the Himalayas and tells his story to Swami
Sivananda. The swami explains: “No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that exists in this universe is illusory. Not only the death of Lila and
her husband’s grief, but also the encounter between you, living men, and their
shades – all these things are illusory. And in a world of appearances, in which
no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own – whoever is
master of certain forces can do anything he wishes. Obviously he doesn’t create
anything real either, but only a play of appearances.”
When Eliade struggles with this,
Sivananda stages a demonstration. The swami squeezes Eliade's arm and drags him along. Eliade
staggers. Hi senses blur. Now he seems to be in a different time and place, back in the humid forest of the
south. Sivananda makes him walk faster. He is again at the charcoal kilns, at
the big house in the forest. “Wake me up!” Eliade pleads.

In his introduction to Two Strange Tales, Eliade discusses the importance
of fiction in his work. Both stories turn on the use of supposed yogic
techniques to wield occult powers. The mélange of reality and fiction in these
stories, he observes, is well-suited to his concept of “camouflage”, of how the
sacred is concealed in the profane. He writes that

in these two stories
“camouflage” is used in a paradoxical manner, for the reader has no means to
know whether the “reality” is hidden in “fiction” or the other way round,
because both processes are intermingled.

A favorite technique of mine aims
at the imperceptible yet gradual transmutation of a commonplace setting into a
new “world’, without however losing its proper, everyday or “natural” structure
and qualities...The parallel world of the fantastic
is indistinguishable from the given ordinary world, but once this other world
is discovered by the various characters it blurs, changes, transforms or
dislocates their lives in different ways.

Each tale creates its own proper
universe, and the creation of such imaginary universes through literary means
can be compared with mythical processes...The imaginary universes brought to
light in littératurefantastique disclose some elements of
reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches.

The second story, "The
Secret of Dr. Honigberger", involves another real person, a colorful German-Romanian from Brasov.The narrator (Eliade himself) receives an invitation
from a Mrs Zerlendi to inspect her husband’s Oriental collection. He
arrives at the kind of house that often features in Eliade’s fantastic tales,
“one of those houses that I never can pass without pausing for a closer look”,
an old villa behind an ironwork fence and an overgrown garden with a
dried-up pool, where a world disappearing from other parts of the city is
strangely preserved. The main entrance is protected by a sunroof of frosted glass, of the kind that
struck me when I visited Eliade’s old neighborhood in Bucharest, on a street near
Mantuleasa.

Eliade is seduced by an immense library of 30,000 books. We
learn that Zerlendi was doing research for a biography of Honigberger, a German-Romanian from Brasov who became famous for his adventures in the East.
However, Zerlendi disappeared many years before. Going through Zerlendi’s
notebook, Eliade finds clues to what happened. Among all his Sanskrit exercise
books, Zerlendi left a journal written in Sanskrit, correctly assuming that it would take a rarely qualified investigator to recognize and interpret its contents. In this journal he recorded his experiments with yogic techniques, including the art
of invisibility. Central to his practice was the kind of dream yoga or lucid dreaming that places high value of maintaining continuity of consciousness between waking, dreaming and other
states.

After some time I woke up sleeping, or, more precisely, I
woke up in sleep, without ever having fallen asleep in the true sense of the
word. My body and all my senses sunk into deeper and deeper sleep, but my mind
didn’t interrupt its activity for a single instant...

I was astounded to behold, with my
eyelids closed, the very same scene as I had with my eyes open…I saw in any
direction I wanted to, I saw wherever I turned my thoughts, whether or not I
had my eyes open.

He sees others moving in their dream bodies.

The unification of consciousness is
attained by means of a continuous
transition, that is, one without a hiatus of any sort, from the waking state to
the state of dreaming sleep, then to that of dreamless sleep, and finally to
the cataleptic state.

Eliade comments: “All the Indian ascetics that I have known
who have consented to give me any explanations regarded this stage, the
unification of the states of consciousness, as the most important of all.
Anyone who did not succeed in experiencing this could never derive any
spiritual benefit from following yoga practice.”

Dr Zerlendi applied himself to placing himself in cataleptic
trance for longer and longer periods. He believed he had proved that he stepped
outside time when he rose after 36 hours to find his face as freshly shaven as
when he lay down. He laid in suspended animation for 12 hours without
drawing breath. He declared, in his secret book, “I know the way to Shambhala. I know how to get
there.”

He made it his aim to transport himself to Shambhala. To do
this he would have to step outside time. He practiced the art of invisibility as a step towards gaining the power of teleportation, de-materializing in one reality in order to re-materialize in another. Seized with excitement, Eliade smuggles the journal out of the house, in order to study Zerlendi's techniques closely. He will return the book covertly before anyone notices it is missing. There is a slight problem. When Eliade returns to the house to interview Mrs Zerlendi again. When he
succeeds, nobody remembers him. He protests that he was working in the library for two full months. This is quite impossible, they tell him. There is no library in the house. There used to be one, but it was broken up and sold off twenty years before. Eliade goes to the house again, hoping that it will be as he first found it. Now the whole scene is falling apart, like a broken dream. The Zerlendi house is being pulled down. My favorite passage in the story: "I have always divided people into two categories: those who understand death as an endto life and the body, and those who conceive it as thebeginningof a new, spiritual existence. And I never form an opinion of any man I meet until I have learned his honest belief about death." Nonfiction fantasy. I like the genre description I just invented. In Eliade's case, it not only means that he gives himself permission to use the identities and circumstances of "real" people, starting with himself. It means that the stories are derived from experiences in realities beyond the physical that may be no less real and sometimes intersect - magically or catastrophically -with the world of the senses. Quotations are from Two Strange Tales by Mircea Eliade, published (appropriately) by Shambhala (Boston, 1986). The translation is credited to Herder & Herder.Art: "Nights in Serampore" by Christian Bode (2016)

Sunday, March 26, 2017

What would it mean if we could seize hold of the understanding that we are living, right now, in one of many worlds with endless doppelgangers in all the others - and might be on a convergence or collision path with some of them? A physicist and a fantasy writer introduce the theme. It is active dreamers who will contribute most to understanding how we can confirm and apply this model of reality on experiential, not merely speculative, levels. Physicist Brian Greene's book The Hidden Reality delivers a scientific model for the idea that we may all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes. When we develop the skills of Active Dreaming, we are able to explore this experientially - and to learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one. Greene makes frequent use of the term "multiverse." It's worth noting that this term was used - and probably coined - a century ago by the great American philosopher, psychologist and psychic researcher William James. James wrote:The cosmos is not a closed and harmonious system; it is a battleground of cross-currents and conflicting purposes; it shows itself, with pathetic obviousness, as not a uni- but a multi-verse.Enter the brilliant and prolific fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, who dropped the hyphen and brough the term "multiverse" into popular usage.In his second Eternal Champion novel, The Sundered Worlds, Moorcock used the word “to describe the idea of the near infinity of co-existing space-time continua each fractionally different, in which certain struggles and stories are played out through eternity, on a vast number of planes of existence.” (I am quoting his introduction to the 1996 omnibus edition of the Eternal Champions series). In the very first novel in the series, Moorcock referred to "Ghost Worlds" rather than to the multiverse. Later in his writing career, Moorcock described the original Eternal Champion novel as “the shout of a young man who finds the world a more complicated place and feels, therefore, betrayed.” He also pronounces it “central” to his work, the jumping-off point for many books that followed. Despite the flaws in this early work, it has one feature that will appeal to dream travelers. The Eternal Champion opens in the liminal state between waking and sleeping, when “we have most of us had the illusion of hearing voices.” In a cold winter bed looking through the window at the moon, the protagonist John Daker, starts hearing a repeated word that sounds like gibberish: Erekosë, Erekosë, Erekosë. Each night he increases his effort to concentrate on this mystery word, his “hallucinations” grow stronger, and then “it seemed I broke free of my body altogether.” As he hangs in darkness, many other names stream through his mind, and the original strange word becomes part of a call: “Erekosë the Champion, where are you?” As the adventure unfolds, we come to understand that the hero has received a call from across time and dimensions, to play his part in a drama in the multiverse. The way that the call comes in the twilight state of hypnagogia will ring true for conscious dreamers. In the sixth novel in Moorcock's Elric series, Elric: Swords and Roses, the hero risks losing his mind in the complexity of competing timelines:Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses occurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him; and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity.But the vision of a seer reassures him, and us, that awakening to the nature of the multiverse can also be the source of great power for the good:It is our firm belief that we shall one day learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicolored stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light--glory beyond glory--pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.Want to know more? Read Brian Greene to satisfy that science-oriented skeptic and speculative thinker inside you. Read Moorcock to enter a fictive multiverse of possibilities. Read my chapter "Soul in the Multiverse" in Dreaming the Soul Back Home for a human model of what it means to live in the many worlds and how dreams can provide first-hand evidence that we are leading continuous lives in other realities. Above all, go dreaming and spend more time - conscious and dreaming - in the twilight zone between sleep and awake, by the techniques you'll find explained in my book Dreamgates.Image: The Eternal Champion of Michael Moorcock's multiverse, by Gerald Brom.

I am savoring these
lines from a poem titled “Consciousness” by the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz:

I think that I am here,
on this earth,To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know.As if I were sent so that whatever takes placeHas meaning because it changes into memory.

These words go deep into
the soul. Say them aloud, and see what stirs in you. Perhaps you will sense,
however obscurely, a soul assignment older than your entry into your present
life experience. This is the beginning of soul remembering:
reclaiming the knowledge that belonged to you, in spirit, before you came into
your present body.

With poetic clarity, Milosz also evokes
our responsibility, as conscious humans, to be the authors of meaning in our
own lives. This requires us to construct stories, and then share them.

Some must take on this task for whole
peoples. In my travels in the Baltic, I became vividly aware of the enormity
and vital importance of this task among populations that suffered three savage
occupations – by the Soviets, the Nazis and then the Soviets again – during
World War II and remained under the iron boot of a totalitarian system that
deformed memory and sought to crush the spirit for another 50 years. The Baltic
republics are again under the shadow of a huge and threatening neighbor.

From my travels in Latvia, I brought home
a searingly brave and beautiful book, With Dance Shoes in Siberian
Snows. The author is Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian art historian who became
her country’s foreign minister after independence. She reports on her efforts
to construct the true story of her family’s tragic experiences as deportees to
the slave labor camps of the Soviet Gulag, where she was born. As the reader
trudges, starved, with her mother and grandmother through the Siberian snows, a
tiny flame flickers.

…whatever takes place

Has meaning because it changes into memory.

Image: Milosz's refugee certificate from the French Government in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set. It gets more interesting. In dreams, you may check in to a parallel life you are leading somewhere else. You may be swimming with seals, or looking for the selkie skin that was hidden from you. You might still be living with your ex, doing the things you would be doing if you had never broken up. You might be marching with those warriors in leather armor under the banner of a Bear Goddess. You might be running that bordello in the French Quarter in old New Orleans. You may be up on a high roof top, looking down on your present life in the perspective of the Double on the Balcony, your eternal witness. When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream. When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you. Jung struggled for clarity on this, and found it late in life. He came to believe that we lead continuous lives in our dreams. Put another way, your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are living somewhere else, a life that goes on whether or not you are tuned to its channel. This is something you can dream on. You get up in the middle of the night and go the bathroom. When you return to bed, you find the same dream is playing as you were dreaming before, but the action has moved along. A bathroom break may be the start of your awakening. Sometimes a dream of this kind reaches to you from another realm like a giant fist, pulling you in and back. It was like that for me one night at Big Sur. I was in a bed overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my window open to catch the sea breeze and the marvelous rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocky shore. In my dreams, I was far away, in Mongolia in a cruel winter, on the eve of World War II. I was engaged in a secret mission, to spy on a team of SS commandos who were seeking to capture the most powerful shamanic artifact in the Central Asia: the spirit banner of Genghis Khan. I stirred from this dream, thrilled and mystified. I might have made it my plan to reenter the dream to try to understand why I was in Mongolia in the 1930s while my body was on the California coast. But no effort on my part was required - unless I had wanted to resist going back. Again and again, through the whole night, the drama played on. All my senses were engaged. Now in a dual or multiple state of consciousness, I could hear the Pacific breakers and turn my body on the bed, while fully present in the Mongolian adventure in a body that felt no less real. I could taste the blood from a horse's neck I was required to drink in order to survive that terrible winter, in a wilderness of snow. I could smell the rank fear of horses and men. I have no doubt I was there.Art: René Magritte, "Faraway Looks" (1927)

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Writing, like anything else you want to do well, is a practice. Having something you really want to say is important, but it may never come through without a practice that supports delivery. I thought I would share some of the elements of practice that work for this writer.

A WRITER'S WAY

1. Show Up. Make time to write something EVERY DAY. What writers do is write.2. Borrow Habits That Worked for You in Other Areas of Life. As you look over your personal history, do you find you were most productive when working regular hours, among other people? Or when you were solitary, seeking to fulfill an assignment under deadline? Apply the habits that worked before to your writing practice.3. Keep a Journal. This is essential practice for any well-lived life, not only a writing life. This isa place for you to commune with your Self, compose your personal encyclopedia of symbols, store quotes and ideas, and gather the raw materials for what may become a script or story.4. Warm Up. Journaling, blogging, writing literate Facebook posts or email letters - as long as they are real letters, not just office stuff - are excellent ways to start working those writing muscles, and material you can rework in a story or essay may just pop up.

5. Set a Time Limit (until you are on a roll and simply can't stop). 30 minutes is great. So you can't finish something in half an hour - even greater, because the next time you sit down you don't have to start with a blank page. I have a 15-minute "hourglass" on my desk. I find I am often amazed by how much I can get down in a quarter hour.

6. Sideline the Editor and Avoid Feedback Felons. Don't judge or evaluate what you are writing until it's done. And do not let others play editor or critic - avoid Feedback Felons (anyone who gives you less than positive encouragement or saddles you with wrong or premature expectations or is simply jealous because you are creating and they are not).

7. Keep Your Fingers Walking. Don't agonize over trying to perfect any part of what you are writing until you have sketched out the whole thing.

8. Relax - and Pay Attention. The flow state is one of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. You are stretching yourself, and your ability to receive and bring through, without forcing anything on the level of the control freak in the ego. If you're stuck, put on some music, take a shower or a swim - getting in flow with water always helps - take a walk for five unscheduled minutes and see what the world gives you.

9. Gag the Demon of Expectations. You want fame and fortune from this, or at least some respect from your friends? Fine. But don't let your expectations damn your performance. Write for the heck of it, have a good time doing this for its own sake.

10. Put Yourself Where the Big Story Can Grab You. Writing, at its core, is about releasing a story. Never forget that the Big story is hunting YOU. The whole art of telling it is to keep moving - further and further from the tame and settled lands - until you get deep enough into the bush for the Big story to jump on you. Then everything will be different, and fabulous.

11. Remember Your Writing Partner. You may have various writing partners, but right now I am talking about the big one, the creative spirit the Romans called the genius. The more you are willing to give yourself to your writing for its own sake, to dare something new, the closer you draw this guiding power and its limitless energy.

12. If You Must Work to Deadline, Make Sure It's an All-But-Impossible Deadline. Our genius loves us best - and helps us most - when we take on the greatest challenges, and play the game hardest.Photo: RM in Yeats' tower, Thoor Ballylee, in County Galway.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Harder. The hooves drive sparks from the rock.
The great wings beat the air, driving a warm wind
Across the snowy slopes of the mountain.

Again, the hooves come down. And again.
The rock groans and yields, releasing the jets
Of the secret spring. I am down on my knees,
Catching the water in my open mouth.
Shockingly cold and pure, it floods my senses
And a figure takes form before me, from the mist.
I know her as grey-eyed Clio, muse of History.
Her sister appears at my other side. I know she is
Sophrosyne, or Tempering. She is not on the roll-call
Of muses; she has come because I need her instruction.
Above my feminine guides, huge as the mountain,
Is their mother, Memory. Knowing is remembering.
I am here to help people remember the origin
And purpose of their lives. My sun-father shines
A blessing on the peak, twin ravens, black and white.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

“This is where the wolf resides. Show me the way through deep forest. Take me back to where I came from, long before. I know the path begins in the dark trees… They know my name. Our family has always worshipped a form of the great Mother. I surrender to your grace. I feel you ever inside me…Holy, wholly.” - The Amber Road painting text 2017

These words are inscribed on the ochre-colored road in my painting The Amber Road. This is the story of how this painting came to be, guided by dreams of my ancestors.

For the past few years I’ve been obsessed with genealogy shows on television. On both Who Do You Think You Are, and Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., famous people trace their ancestry, often revealing unknown family stories and thrilling revelations of ancestors that share common interests and life experiences.

In the late spring of 2015 I got my DNA tested and had some surprising revelations of my own! All my life I was told that I was half Yugoslavian (Serbian and Montenegrin) and half Polish. When I was in 5th grade I became obsessed with Ireland, and dreamed of travelling there, so I started tucking away extra coins into a large green glass wine jug to save up money for the journey. My grandmother recalls that I used to tell people that “My dad is Polish and my mom is Yugoslavian, but I’mIrish!” So when I opened my DNA results I was shocked to find out I did indeed have a tiny percentage of blood from the British Isles, as well as several other places and cultures that I have felt a profound connection with. I have had dreams and visions of reindeer herding people from the far north, and I discovered that I have Yakut (Siberian) as well as Scandinavian blood. As I sat in front of my computer, dumbfounded, with chills running up my spine as I read the results, a vision formed in my mind’s eye of lines of ancestors fanning out in long rows behind me, stretching all the way to early, prehistoric times. It was the first time I had a visceral sense of myself as being connected to the ancient past, to indigenous people, my people. I saw the thrumming beauty of DNA woven like threads in a basket rushing forward to the present… and had the sense that I AM MY ANCESTORS. For a moment I stepped outside of time and space and felt part of a vast continuum of humanity, like I had a place in history. I wept at the feeling of homecoming, confirmation and remembrance.

A few months prior to these revelations I recorded the following dreams:

The Amber Rosary and Blessed with Cabbage Water 5/14/2015

I dreamed that I needed to be on my way, and dusk was falling, so I took up jogging, unsure of where I was going, or how to get back to my car. I couldn’t remember where my room was for the night, and I hadn't checked in yet. It felt like Virginia~ the trees were bare and lacy, so I knew it was late fall.

I came to a tent set up in a driveway and saw two nuns in white, and immediately thought they might be able to help me. The one in front saw me right away. She was sprinkling holy water on people with a purple cabbage leaf. That felt so familiar to me, connected to my Polish heritage. There were religious items laid out on the table, rosaries etc. The nuns chanted in what I first thought was Polish, then realized was Latin.

Dipping a cabbage leaf in a bowl, the nun sprinkled me with holy water, and indicated I should take an amber rosary that was in a cloth bag on the table. I wasn't sure if I should make a donation or not. I walked around to another table and saw all sorts of baked goods, including triangular scones with rosaries baked into them. I asked the nuns for directions, worried because I couldn’t remember my eventual destination, and my phone was low on juice. They couldn't help me, and said I should ask someone at a service station. I saw a woman from Spirit Rock Meditation Center with medium length dark hair and couldn't remember her name, but was relieved to see someone familiar. I knew she would help me. We started chatting and I picked out a rosary, and I told her how I was embarrassed that I had forgotten her name. She said her name was Sarah and I saw that she had become Sarah A., my dear friend and I was overjoyed!

At the back of the booth two young 15-year-old girls were helping out and they started singing for us! They sang haunting Appalachian/Eastern European sounding harmonies~ quietly at first, then building in strength and power, completely a cappella. We were riveted by their perfect harmonic sound. It gave me chills of recognition.

Then it was time for me to be on my way so I took off jogging and wished I had settled into my accommodations before I have left on his journey.

At Dream Teacher Training Level One in July 2015 at Mosswood Hollow in Washington State I encountered a wonderful woman and fellow dreamer, Stefania, who was also of Polish descent. I shared these dreams with her and we discussed many levels of connection and symbolism. She was the first Polish person I had really connected with outside of my family, and it felt like we held keys of wisdom and knowledge for each other.

Just days before leaving for the Dream Teacher Training I had the following dream:

Our Family Has Always Worshipped a Form of the Great Mother 7/12/15

I dreamed I was with Sonia and Tadek (my siblings) and Sonia had on a beautiful, intricate, spiritual piece of jewelry. It was a thin gold chain that draped around her body with tiny carved figures made of jade, aquamarine and citrine and faceted rosary-like beads. It was a prayer/spiritual device. We were at Nana and Dziadzi’s (my Polish grandparents) house in Fremont in the front yard. Nana Aggie was there and she pointed out a large white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary in a place of honor amid the cactus and juniper bushes, and she told me that: “Our family has always worshipped a form of the Great Mother.”

In September 2015, in a moment of Facebook synchronicity, a video popped up that I am certain has changed the course of my life. The video was of Laboritorium Piesni, a young all-female polyphonic singing group from Gdansk, Poland. At the first sound of their voices rising in song (just like the sisters in the Amber Rosary dream) and the heartbeat thud of the drum, I was riveted, blood pounding and my eyes filled with tears. I felt my ancestors clamor around me as I listened to the voice of the ancients sing through these young women that could be my sisters. Suddenly my Polish lineage felt relevant to me, I could see myself among these women, singing draped in earth-colored fabric, dancing in a circle, arms tracing the shape of sacred energies…

The song, Sztoj pa moru, was the fuel for my painting, The Amber Road, that I began at an intuitive painting workshop in October 2015 in Portland Oregon with inspiring teacher Flora Bowley and finished a year later. Using deep turquoise, black, ochre and fluorescent red, applied with a large foam brush, I created a dark under painting for the first layer, which is unusual for me~ I usually work in bright, vibrant colors. After the layer dried, I approached it again, and as this song looped on repeat in my headphones, the painting began to reveal itself and I was pulled into the dark woods I often visit in dreams. I consciously steered myself into the Amber Rosary dream as the art studio faded away and the harmonic music circling through my ears induced a mild trance state. I painted for six hours that day and five the next day, barely stopping as the world of my dream came to life before my eyes, infused with the energy and essence of my ancestors~ The sacred purple cabbage leaf dripping holy water, the dark trees looming overhead, the white plaster Mary statue, draped in gold chains, who, as my mother pointed out later, actually looks like a Black Madonna.

Chestnuts for Mary 10/15/2016

I dreamed it was a holiday (Thanksgiving or Christmas) and I was with my family. There was a high wooden mantle (like the one at my adolescent home) and Mimi said I should “Give some chestnuts to Mary.” There was a large framed image/icon of mother Mary, and I arranged autumn leaves, orange cherry tomatoes, 2 termite wings and 2 chunks of tree sap/amber on the mantel in front of the image. Mimi placed a several chestnuts up there and it felt right.

At Thanksgiving, when I visited my mom and grandma in Oregon, I noticed my mom had a greeting card that looked very much like the image of the goddess in the dream, which inspired me to lead a simple ritual to honor this dream and our ancestral line. We bought chestnuts and lit candles and frankincense, and I played music from Laboritorium Piesni’s new album. We sat quietly around the table, holding our chestnuts and pouring our prayers into them. Through closed eyes, with the resonant voices rising in waves around us, I saw a vision of my ancient family, in concentric circles of women and circles of men, dancing around a fire outside of a village in former Yugoslavia. I felt my beloved departed also in the room (my dad, Popi, Dziadai and Nana, Ciocia Jane and Uncle Tadek among others) as we called up a connection to our ancestral line. Then, beginning with my grandmother, we offered our chestnuts to the image of Mary on the hearth, our prayers flickering by candlelight.

During this visit I showed my mom a photo the Amber Road painting in progress, and she exclaimed that the goddess figure actually looked like a Black Madonna, which was unintentional on my part, but resonated as soon as she said it. It also immediately made me think of my Polish grandmother’s funeral card, which depicts the famous Black Madonna, Our Lady of Czestochowa, from Poland. In the course of my research into this particular Black Madonna, I learned that King Louis of Hungary (1326-1382) brought the Black Madonna to Poland in response to a dream. I discovered that there are numerous Black Madonna statues located throughout Europe, and that some theories suggest that they may have originally been depictions of pre-Christian goddesses such as Isis, Demeter, Persephone, Astarte, and Athena. When Christianity came to various areas in Europe, people had to take down their shrines and “cloak” their goddesses in the more acceptable guise of the Virgin Mary and child, much like is done in syncretic religions such as Candomble and Santeria. This seems related to what my grandmother told me in the dream: “Our family has always worshipped a form of the great Mother”.

I put the finishing touches on the Amber Road painting by adding red, blue and ochre fabric motifs to the tree trunks. The motifs are based on embroidery from a blouse my great grandmother brought back from Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. These red “flags” are markers, guiding the way through the trees, encoded with patterns and messages, just like my blood and DNA is encoded with vital information. In the Amber Rosary dream I was trying to find my way, looking for my place, and now these flags, woven of memories, stories, dreams, and recollections are pointing the way.

These dreams have given me exciting clues and set me on a path to discovering the lines of my family, known and unknown. I have been talking to family members and consulting a family history my father wrote. I’ve started learning the Polish language, with hopes of attending a singing workshop with Laboritorium Piesni when they come to the US for the first time in the fall of 2017. My big dream is to travel to Poland in September 2018 to visit places my family lived, and to study polyphonic singing and Polish crafts, such as basket making and paper cutting, as well as traditional herbal medicine and pagan practices. My dreams are weaving the way…

Tenaya Amelia is a life-long dreamer trained as a teacher of Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Intuitive, sensitive and creative, she holds a safe and vibrant space to explore the inner realms. Tenaya weaves together intuitive painting, collage, expressive movement and evocative music into her unique offerings. She is based in Northern California and offers workshops, private dream sessions and a monthly dream salon. Tenaya is Robert's guest on his Way of the Dreamer radio show on Tuesday March 14. Listen to the show live or download from the archive

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

We often wake with a dream hangover, even if we don't recall the
dreams that caused it. Freud said that dreams are full of "day residue",
thoughts and memories left over from waking life. It is no less true that our
days are full of dream residue.

Sometimes we become aware of this when we wake up feeling
jet-lagged or even as if we have been run over by a truck, even though we
seemed to sleep well enough. This is often the effect of what esoteric writers
used to call "astral repercussion". You get out and about in an
energy body, in night dreams, and what happens to that astral vehicle may
reverberate in your physical system. In extreme cases, like those Dion Fortune
made the stuff of the highly illuminating and sometimes cautionary tales in herSecrets
of Doctor Taverner, bruises or apparent wounds may be left on the
physical body. Those jetlag sensations may be caused by a lot of dream travel;
if you are flying across the world in a dream body, especially if you are
crossing large bodies of water (which drain energy from the subtle body) you
may have quite literal reasons to feel the way you would feel after a long
flight on a plane. Frequent fliers need to learn more about the nature and care
and maintenance of energy bodies, which is a major theme in my bookDreamgates.

Our dream activity, remembered or not, often sets the tone for
the day. Sometimes we rise with a terrific surge of energy and confidence or a
clear sense of direction that was lacking the day before. We may say that we
slept well; chances are we also dreamed well.

The "vigilance" theory developed by Finnish dream
researcher Antti Revonsuo maintains that in dreams the brain rehearses for
patterns of challenge and opportunity that lie ahead, preparing us to move
faster and more effectively when certain situations arise, and that this
activity is important and useful whether or not we remember our dreams.

Deja vu is one of the most striking examples of dream residue,
though many of us fail to understand how it comes about. We meet a person or
enter a scene that is absolutely familiar to us; we are sure we have seen this
before. Most often this is because we are now catching up, in waking life, with
an event that first took place in a dream.

Sometimes dream residue is so outrageous and in our face that we
can't fail to see it. In my bookConscious DreamingI report an episode shared with me by a
nurse who dreamed she received a visitation from a guide who appeared as
half-woman, half-deer. In the morning, she was amazed to find deer scat on the
rug in her second-floor apartment. It seemed impossible that it could be there
- unless it spilled from the dream.

We might recall Coleridge's famous questions:

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep,
you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a
strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower
in your hand? Ah, what then?

Then we would know that the dream experiences are real, and that
what goes on in the dream world doesn't necessarily stay in the dream world. It
happens.

Monday, March 6, 2017

The shamans who interest me are world-class dreamers who
can travel between different worlds in the multiverse at will.
They know the roads of the afterlife because they have died and
come back. They walk with Death at their left shoulder, as an ally, not a
dread.
They know where to find lost souls and how to guide them to where
they belong, in one world or another.
They travel in the company of animal spirits, and can borrow
their senses and use their forms.
They are time travelers who can scout out the future, repair the
past and heal ancestral karma.
They are poets of consciousness who entertain the spirits by
bringing them fresh words. They heal body and mind and re-enchant the world by
telling better stories about them.

Let's go back to the beginning.

In
all the descriptions of the shaman in the literature – as wounded healer, as
guide of souls, as walker between worlds, as negotiator with the spirits –
there is an essential element that is rarely featured strongly enough, and is
sometimes missed altogether.
First and last, the shaman is a dreamer. Shamans typically
receive their calling in dreams, and are initiated and trained in the
Dreamtime. The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They
may incubate dreams to diagnose for a patient and to select the appropriate
treatment. They travel – wide awake and lucid – in their dream bodies to find
lost souls, to intercede with the spirits, to fight sorcerers and to guide
spirits of the departed along the right roads.

In indigenous North America, the
dominant word for "shaman" (and also for "healer" or
spiritual elder") means Dreamer, as in one who dreams strong, one who can
dream for others, one who can travel at will into other realities. In Mohawk (a
language I had to learn because of my dreams) the word is
"rateshents". Among the Dane-zaa of northern B.C. and Alberta, the
Naachin, or Dreamers, are the shamans who travel between worlds and open roads
for others.

Anyone
who dreams, as the Kawahiv, an Amazonian dreaming people say, is "a little
bit shaman". We stand on the brink of claiming this power when we remember
our dreams and start to develop the practice of working with dreams as daily
practice.
Dreaming, a contemporary
American woman finds herself in a different body, traveling with her clan
beside a river in a primal landscape untouched by the ax. She knows the lives
and relations of these native people intimately and feels the coming of a hard
winter. She sees an eagle flying near the river, and someone tells
her, “You can go fly with it.” She is afraid to go too far from the river, so
she waits until the eagle hovers overhead. Then, as she told me later,

I fly an eternal moment with this magnificent bird:
beautiful brown, glistening feathers with golden speckles. Eagle is above me,
beside me, then lands in the river. I land downstream and float on the warm
white foam. The river is blanketed in white foam.

After I dry off, I fly over the river again. I see turtles where Eagle had
flown and landed. The turtles are a darker green. They are solid on the foam,
not moving, just peacefully sunning themselves.

The dreamer asked me
how she should approach the meaning of this dream. For me, an experience of
this kind requires not analysis but honoring. Her dream was a journey into the
life circumstances of an indigenous people, an entry into a “past” life that might
be a previous experience of her own multidimensional self, or that of an
ancestor of the land where she lives, or of her wider spiritual family. Within
that life experience, she learned what indigenous dream shamans know: you can
become an eagle.

"Why do we dream?" asked the blue butterfly girl, looking around the circle of animals she had invited to her tea party by the garden gate.

"You dream so we can always be together," said Bear, without hesitation. "You dream so you will always have a friend. "

"You dream so you can see," said Hawk. His golden eyes flashed.

"You dream so you can learn to be brave like me," said Lion.

"Nonsense," said Mr. Fox. "You dream so you can tell stories about me."

"Grandfather," the girl looked into the tea water. "Why do we dream?" Grandfather Teller's voice bubbled like a pot about to boil. "You dream because humans are the animals that tell stories about all the others."Drawing by Robert Moss

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Poets, it’s said, are shamans of words. True shamans are poets
of consciousness. Journeying into a deeper reality with the aid of sung and
spoken poetry, they bring back energy and healing through poetic acts,
shapeshifting physical systems. When we dream, we tap directly into the same
creative source from which poets and shamans derive their gifts. When we create
from our dreams, and enter dreamlike flow, we become poets and artists. When weactto bring the energy and imagery of
dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our
world with magic.

InBirth of a Poet, William
Everson raised a clamorous appeal for poets to reawaken to their shamanic
calling: "O Poets! Shamans of the word! When will you recover the
trance-like rhythms, the subliminal imagery, the haunting sense of possession,
the powerful inflection and enunciation to effect the vision? Shamanize!
Shamanize!" Across the centuries, many of our greatest poets have
recognized their kinship with the shaman’s way of shifting awareness and
shapeshifting reality. As his name in a spiritual order, Goethe chose the name
of a legendary shaman of antiquity, Abaris, who came flying out of the Northern
mists on an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times,
true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to
teach and to heal. They understand that through the play of words, sung or
spoken, the magic of the Real World comes dancing into the surface world. The
right words open pathways between the worlds. The poetry of consciousness
delights the spirits. It draws the gods and goddesses who wish to live through
us closer.

Shamans use poetry, sung or spoken, to achieve ends that go
deeper than our consensual world. They create poetic songs of power to invoke
spiritual help; to journey into nonordinary reality; to open and maintain a
space between the worlds where interaction between humans and multidimensional
beings can take place and to bring energy and healing through to the body and
the physical world.

The South Americanpayetakes flight with the help of
"wing songs". These flightsongs
help him to borrow the wings of thekumalakbird [a kind of kite] that is a
main ally of shamans.

Among the Inuit, the strongest shamans are also the most gifted
poets. One of the reasons their spirit helpers flock around them is that they
are charmed and exhilarated by the angakok’s poetic improvisations. Inuit
shamans have a language of their own, which is often impenetrable to other
Eskimos. It is a language that is never still. It bubbles and eddies, opening a
whirlpool way to the deep bosom of the Sea-goddess, or a cavernous passage into
the hidden fires of Earth.

My favorite Inuit shaman-word is the one for "dream".
It looks like this:kubsaitigisak.It is pronounced
"koov-sigh-teegee-shakk", with a little click at the back of the
throat when you come to the final consonant. It means "what makes me dive
in headfirst." Savor that for a moment, and all that flows with it. A
dream, in Eskimo shaman-speech, is something that makes you dive in headfirst.
Doesn’t this wondrously evoke the kinesthetic energy of dreaming, the sense of
plunging into a deeper world? Doesn’t it also invite us to take the plunge, in
the dream of life, and burst through the glass ceilings and paper barriers
constructed by the daily trivial self?

Shamans know further uses for poetry. They use song and poetic
speech call the soul back home, into the bodies of those who have lost vital
energy through pain or trauma or heartbreak. From their own journeys, they
bring back poetic imagery that can help to shapeshift the body’s energy
template in the direction of health. Mainstream Western physicians agree that
the body believes in images and responds to them as if they are physical
events. By bringing therightimages through from the
dreaming, the poets of consciousness explain dis-ease in ways that help the
patient get well, and interact with the body and its immune system on multiplelevels without invasive surgery. After attending healing sessions of Cuna shamans in Panama, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straussexplained how the poetry of consciousness is a healing art. "The shaman provides the sick...with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can immediately be expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression which induces the release of the physiological process." Instead of giving an explanation of disease that leaves the sufferer powerless and "patient", the shaman explains disease through words and images that help the body get well - just as our dreams do. This is healing through dream transfer, a poetic act. Let's recall the Inuit wisdom that with the poetic act, the worlds are joined and the sacred beings come dancing through. An old Inuit woman on Little Diomede Island explained to a Danish anthropologist that powerful spirits - like the spirit of the whale - must be summoned by "fresh words". "Worn-out songs" should never be used when you are trying to call on important spirits.

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